THERE were too few penguins in the Antarctic, and then lots more. Now they’re starving. Same thing with ice: there was too little and now too much, which is killing the penguin chicks. Yet every change we’re told: it’s global warming. Be scared.

“Bill’s Adelies, struggling, failing, persisting, succumbing, were a small poignant example of a potentially vast reality. In one sense, they had become surrogate humans. Through them, the impact of a changing climate on established communities was palpably visible, a kind of parable in real time. This is how it is, if you have been residing in attractive island real estate, and climate change comes knocking on your door.” p. 268, The Ferocious Summer, Profile Books Ltd, 2007

The literary awards of Labor Premier John Brumby are … worth a total of $210,000… And the non-fiction prize … [went to”> The Ferocious Summer: Palmer’s penguins and the warming of Antarctica by Meredith Hooper Again, to explain:Meredith Hooper has captured how one scientific team uncovered the story of the devastating impact of rapid global warming on the Adelie penguins of the Antarctic Peninsula.

SBS reports: Penguins are in peril because of extreme environmental conditions linked to climate change, research has shown…. Adelie penguins on Ross Island, Antarctica, are finding it harder to feed as melting sea ice fragments to form giant icebergs.

For the first time, researchers have counted all the world’s Adélie penguins—a sprightly seabird considered a bellwether of climate change—and discovered that millions of them are thriving in and around Antarctica… “What we found surprised everyone,” said ecologist Heather Lynch at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, N.Y., who led the penguin census. “We found a 53% increase in abundance globally.” Counting the birds by satellite, Dr. Lynch and imaging specialist Michelle LaRue at the University of Minnesota found that the Adélie penguin population now numbers 3.79 million breeding pairs—about 1.1 million more pairs than 20 years ago. In all, they identified 251 penguin colonies and surveyed 41 of them for the first time, including 17 apparently new colonies.

Almost the entire cohort of chicks from an Adelie penguin colony in the eastern Antarctic was wiped out by starvation last summer in what scientists say is only the second such incident in over 40 years. Researchers said Sunday the mass die-off occurred because unusually large amounts of sea ice forced penguin parents to travel farther in search of food for their young. By the time they returned, only two out of thousands of chicks had survived.